Re-theorizing culture-based maternal child-rearing: a rural-urban divide in mothering script for women who lived through China’s age of scarcity

Compared with urban mothers, rural Chinese mothers are commonly stereotyped as less educated, precariously employed, or migrant workers. Within the dominant intensive mothering discourse, their child-rearing practices are frequently judged as authoritarian or inadequate. Yet such depictions overlook the cultural logic and aspirational functions embedded in their maternal strategies. Drawing on 24 oral history narratives from rural and urban mothers born between the 1960s and 1980s, as well as reflective accounts from their first-generation college student children—who also served as insider researchers—this study adopts a traditional Confucian moral framework and treats urban cases primarily as a comparative reference, rather than a generalized benchmark for evaluating parenting practices. The findings reveal that rural mothers, in particular, cultivate a “morally mothering script” grounded in Confucian ethics and embodied hardship. Despite limited institutional power, they enact strong moral surveillance, emotionally embedded relationships, and intrinsically motivated caregiving. While modernization has widened the generational divide, this script persists—manifesting differently across rural and urban contexts—and continues to shape pathways of mobility and contemporary understandings of motherhood in China.